There was a time - not so long ago - when you'd have been hard-pressed to find a genuine 'budget projector', but the Canon LV-S4 fits the bill nicely as it sells for about £655 including VAT.

The LV-S4 uses LCD technology and has a native SVGA resolution of 800 x 600 pixels as well as a rated brightness of 1,500 lumens. The contrast ratio of 300:1 is quite low, but that's normal with LCD projectors as the technology is incapable of displaying true blacks (i.e. cutting off all light), and as a result the range of colours that an LCD projector is able to display is reduced.

Despite this apparent failing we found that the picture was very warm and pleasant to look at. While you can certainly use the Canon to watch movies we are sure that its 2.3kg weight and 270mm (wide) x 83mm (high) x 197mm (deep) dimensions mean that it will be popular with mobile workers who don't want to lug a hefty projector around when they are giving presentations.

Canon provides composite, VGA and audio mini jack inputs plus VGA pass-through and audio output connections, but you only get a VGA cable and power cord in the box so you'll have to fork out extra cash if you want to use the other ports.

A cheap, light, relatively small projector makes perfect sense but there's plenty of room for improvement with this model as both the focus and zoom controls are in the lens housing and are a bit fiddly to operate, but the real horror is the set-up menu. It is arranged in an unusual layout that borders the picture and seems utterly illogical, but as you can change most of the settings using the remote control it makes life easier if you simply ignore the set-up menu wherever possible.

The single biggest problem we have with the Canon is the amount of noise that it makes. In normal mode it is rated at 38.5dB and if you switch to ultra-quiet mode the rating drops to 33dB. Those numbers seem perfectly respectable and they compare well to similar projectors from rival companies, but in practice the noise is intrusive.

Canon has delivered a cheap, effective LCD projector that caters for a significant sector of the market. Unfortunately, like so many items at the lower reaches of a product range, you can see that corners have been cut to save cash.